Twitter Inc. doesn’t exist anymore, but X Corp. does.
The company owned by Elon Musk, X Corp., has bought Twitter Inc. as a first step towards becoming an “everything app” like China’s WeChat.
Twitter seems to be slowly changing from a microblog to a platform for everything. Twitter Inc. no longer exists, at least in name, because of a series of changes in who owns the company.
Slate has learned that X Corp. and Twitter Inc. joined together on April 4. This information was found in court documents from a case between Twitter and Laura Loomer that is still going on.
The court case isn’t very important. Loomer is suing Twitter for breaking federal racketeering laws when her account was banned in 2019. What’s interesting is that court documents were made public.
“Twitter, Inc. has been merged into X Corp. and no longer exists,” the filing says.
This merger hasn’t been made public yet, and it probably won’t change the app or service right away, but it is Elon Musk’s first step. He had said before that Twitter would become an “app for everything” called X and could compete with platforms like China’s WeChat.
There is no evidence that X Corp. will really lead to the X app. Reports also say that this could be a step towards putting all of Musk’s businesses, like Tesla and Space X, under the control of a bigger company called X.
In an interesting twist, this also means that the entity that is Twitter under X Corp. is now based in Nevada instead of Delaware. But Musk and Twitter’s old debts and lawsuits will follow them to their new company, X Corp.
And Musk was the first person to own the domain “X.com.” Around the turn of the century, he used it for a payment service that became part of Paypal.
He bought the domain again in 2017 for an unknown amount.
Twitter is still a social media platform that can be used. It continues to be controversial because of who it lets in and who it kicks out, as well as what kind of content it lets in.
Many users, especially in the tech world, have tried to escape this chaos by switching to different platforms or giving up social media altogether. AppleInsider still uses Twitter, but you can also find them on Facebook, Instagram, and Mastodon.
